Too many councillor cooks can spoil the broth

Guelph Mercury

Re:

I read the Jan. 22 article, Procedure change upsets councillor, where Bob Bell was “infuriated” because he and other Guelph counsellors would not be able to ask questions at committee meetings where they were not members.

Although there seemed to be logic to what he says, I would like to express a different opinion based on an experience I had a little over a year ago.

I was the president of a non-profit co-operative development corporation that was building a complex in Bell’s and Coun. Jim Furfaro’s ward. Some neighbours were upset about a privacy fence that they were promised by our co-operative’s development consultant. These promises, which were undocumented, were made several years prior to any of us being on the board, and we had no knowledge of them.

The building project was in its final stages when these issues were raised. Our residents were anxious to get on with their lives. Many had been living in their units for more than a year, but could not get mortgages until the city registered the condominiums.

Bell sat on the board of an adjoining property owned by the county, which held the small piece of land between these neighbours’ homes, which our co-operative was required to develop into a walkway for the neighbourhood. This was a part of the original agreement with the city. Now that the buildings were all done and the residents had moved in, the city was delaying registration of our property until these issues were settled.

When I contacted Bell, he told me that I needed to work with Furfaro to try to satisfy the other neighbours as he was dealing with the interest of the county board to which he was a member. I immediately called Furfaro who arranged a meeting with those neighbours the very same day. When I arrived, they were very upset, but when they realized that our board did not even know of their problems, but were anxious to reach an acceptable agreement to all parties, we began to look for solutions.

It was a challenging activity, because we had to get an easement agreement with the county, which owned the property; we had to develop the walkway according to how the city wanted it (they only wanted landscaping without a fence); and we had to satisfy the neighbours, who definitely wanted a privacy fence.

The desires of each party seemed to be mutually exclusive. We had no problem agreeing that the co-operative would pay for the building of the fences. To deal with the difference between the demands of the city and the homeowners, we decided we would build the fences within the boundaries of their property. In this way, the city could not stop it.

We would add further landscaping to satisfy the city, and reduce damage to their new fences. We were all satisfied that we had a negotiated agreement that each party could live with. Enter Bell. He immediately started to get involved by bringing up things that were extraneous to the issues at hand, and sowing the seeds of doubt and frustration between me, representing the co-operative (124 condo owners), and the neighbouring two homeowners.

The saying “Too many cooks spoil the broth” was exactly true in our case. Therefore, my opinion regarding the points brought forth in the Jan. 22 article is that councillors should seek membership on those committees where they have an interest and the requisite talent to add value to the committee. But as far as committees to which they are not a member, they should have an “observer only” status. They can confer outside the meeting with their fellow councillors who are members, but have should have no participation in the actual meeting.

In an accompanying story in the same paper, you spoke about the attendance record of the councillors at meetings and inferred a correlation between effectiveness and attendance. In our case, Bell’s overbearing desire to be at all meetings was neither helpful, nor wanted.